Companies strive to promote changes to their live systems through testing projects so quality in such systems can be assured. Each testing project requires non-production test environments in which the project can be tested according to the required solution. According to the characteristics of the project, the testing team must request access to test environment resources that will support the provided solution. Customers often challenge a test manager's decision of required systems, determined to know about the end-to-end limits of the test and the interfaces being used.
The duration of testing projects can vary between several months for larger changes, and several hours for extremely small and pin-pointed changes. A testing project cannot be completed without the correct resources. Therefore, projects that cannot quickly identify required needs and obtain access to the relevant systems will face delays.
Companies invest in the purchasing of hardware and also in virtualizing test environments on top of such hardware. Although a set of test environments is setup for some elements that are more commonly used, there are always additional elements from which only a single resource is available. Therefore, a full end-to-end test environment is a unique setup, highly in demand by multiple projects.
The lack of a clear view of the impacted systems by each requirement creates an even higher demand for the end-to-end environment as test managers and customers are never sure they have all required elements, unless they have a fully integrated environment. Investigations performed into the reasons projects are not meeting their milestones show an alarming rate of projects that had delays as a result of unavailable environment element resources at the time the project was ready to start. Further investigation shows that with proper management such delays can be avoided, but to achieve this there is a need for clear visibility into the state of the solution and a proper booking mechanism of each element to projects.
The investigation shows projects go into delay even when utilization of the environments is low, as the environment is reserved to a project that needs it only occasionally but has booked the environment for a long period, or has issues with other systems that prevent the ability to use this element, while the other project had no such dependencies and could have utilized the environment if a proper management tool had been in place.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.